Old Garmin, extended life.

Hi,
I have successfully extended the life of my almost ten year old garmin. Free and legal.
Here I will describe the steps I did and as always: Do a backup before you start to play around!

Part one: Order a map.

In the first post in the thread "Free routable maps for Garmin" we have an excellent place to get a map, my choice was the first link: http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/

When you open the site there are some question marks that needs attention.

First question mark: Choose your map type.
I chose "generic routable"
There is other options but they are unexplored by me.

Second question mark: Include a TYP file.
None or mapnik is the option. I chose "none"

Third question mark: Choose a predefined country.
This step i did not use at all.

Fourth question mark: Perhaps you'd like to add some additional tiles?
Here i check the box, that allows you to select directly on the map what parts of the world you want.

Now it is time to select, Left click will mark square maps and leftclick again to unmark areas you dont need.
Left click and move the cursor is an effectively way to rough selecting an area. Then i left click away areas i dont need.
It is possible to push: Reset selection and start all over if you change your mind.

In the left side of the website you can see how big the map is in compressed size.
The map i order had the size of 1,2 Gb, when it was decompressed the size was 1,6 Gb.
My old nuvi 300 can handle maps up to 2 Gb.

When you are ready and happy with the map it is time to fill in an email adress.

After that just hit the button: Build my map

Now you get an email with a link to a website where you can see the status of the map production, my first map was built in 13 hours.

Step two.

The map is ready, now there is a window of 60 hours to download the map. You will get a link to a download site.

The map can be downloaded in different versions:
osm generic windows.exe (basecamp/mapsource)
osm generic tiles.zip (Qlandkarte/Linux)
osm generic macosx.zip (basecamp/roadtrip for mac users)
osm generic gmapsupp.zip (for sd card directly)

Here I chose to download the windows.exe and the gmapsupp.zip

My first attempt was to test the file gmapsupp.zip
It should be placed directly on the memory card, i extract the file in my computer and placed the file directly to my sd card.
Then I put the memory card in my nuvi and it worked as intended, I had no difficulty getting it to work.

When I was convinced that the map works, i removed the old map out the internal memory and threw it.

The windows file is still unpacked in my computer, the file for the sd card worked without any trouble so i just left the windows file in a corner in my computer, but on occasion I'll watch it in basecamp.

best of luck

Jocke